Supreme Coziness On The Court

Political fallout in the capital

Despite The Rough Road He Took To The Top Court, Clarence Thomas Will Find A Warm Community Where Wounds Heal Quickly.

October 20, 1991|By Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON — When Clarence Thomas starts work at the Supreme Court, he probably will drive his own car, turn into the drive at the rear and get waved on into the garage by a smiling police officer. Just as if he had worked there for years.

It is a place where a judge can work 30 or more years in genuine contentment and get over - perhaps quite quickly - wounds and blisters suffered in the political process passed through on the way there.

The only real looking back that one needs to do is to the precedents, the guiding law of the past. Sometimes even that can be forgotten.

However hurt or harried justice-designate Thomas may be after his 107-day battle to win Senate approval, he will find himself at the court wrapped up in a supportive little community - only 320 people, all counted - that takes care of its own, knows how to disagree amiably even if the written words often ring angrily and rallies around when ganged up on from the outside.

Thomas would have seen just that last week if he could have paid attention to what was going on inside the Supreme Court building; his days, of course, were spent elsewhere in tumult, going from the pain of withering accusations in the Senate to the pomp of his own grand ceremony at the White House.

There were several episodes inside the marble temple across from the Capitol, each a telltale happening that in fact reflected the norms of life there.

On Tuesday - the day that Thomas anxiously was awaiting the final Senate vote on his nomination - the court assembled and called to its lectern Justice William Brennan - the 85-year-old former colleague who retired last year.

He was there to ask the court formally to put his nephew, Robert Brennan of Los Angeles, on the court's roll of lawyers who practice there, along with two California friends, Stephen Cole of El Macero and Bret Culbreth of West Sacramento.

It was Brennan's first time back in any capacity other than interested spectator in the courtroom. Before he made his motion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist warmly greeted him and voiced his former colleagues' pleasure at his return. There was not a hint of the years of deep philosophical division between ''the chief'' and Brennan.

The next day - the one on which Thomas could at last relax with the certainty that he would be a justice - the court held a hearing of a case that affects women seeking abortions; there is no angrier issue before the court, and the justices are divided deeply along philosophical and - at times - emotional lines, as much of the rest of the country seems to be.

But, through an hour of civil discourse, with known antagonists on the court picking up on each other's points or questions, even at times seeming to support a view they likely do not hold, the intellectual battle went on with not the slightest hint of rancor.

Later that day, word would pass in the court's corridors that the chief's wife, known within the court as Nan, was nearing death.

When the justices and staff returned to work the next day, Thursday, Nan Rehnquist had died, and the mood of mourning was palpable everywhere from the cafeteria line on the first floor to the chambers upstairs.

While Thomas on that day busied himself with the White House to plan his oath-taking, the court's members and staff awaited funeral plans. The two events got strangely mixed before that day was over: Court attaches and White House staffers, on the telephone, exchanged views about whether the new justice's oath ceremony should wait.

There were indications that, in those conversations, it was suggested fairly subtly that the justices did not particularly like having to go out for a ceremony with the chief and the court in mourning, but neither were they prepared to stay away, giving offense to Thomas.

At one point during the day, according to the White House, President Bush called Rehnquist. No one would say what they discussed. At the court, however, aides said they were sure that the chief would have made no effort to get the Thomas ceremony put off on his or his family's behalf.

''Too much a gentleman for that,'' remarked one aide.

The White House ceremony did occur Friday, with Justice Byron White standing in for Rehnquist to administer Judge Thomas' constitutional oath.

White politely informed Thomas that he would not be fully a member of the court until Nov. 1, when he is to take another oath required by law.

Whatever had happened to Thomas on his way to that ceremony, the court's members tend to understand. In fact, in private conversations, they have fretted over what Supreme Court nominees lately have gone through to get on their bench. Some of the justices have made special efforts, according to court insiders, to make certain that survivors of the process know that when it is over, it is over.

Before Clarence Thomas' first public day on the bench Nov. 4, his eight colleagues will assemble with him, and everyone will shake hands all around. They will then emerge, in threes, from behind the red velour drapes. And he will belong.